Consumer interactions with products and services don't occur on a purely rational level. Deeply-held values and psychological typologies structure the way your target audience thinks, feels and responds to your various products, offers and communications. Speaking to consumers at this psychological level can make the difference between being something consumers merely see as having interesting characteristics to becoming the product or service they just "have to have." At Gray Insight, we incorporate psychological techniques into all our qualitative research, putting you in contact with your target consumers' psychological makeup.

Using the expertise of our staff psychologist, Thelma Beam, we can uncover the psychological model that consumers use to relate to your brand, product or service. Whether in dedicated Typology Discovery sessions or even in more conventional focus group situations, we incorporate projective techniques that can be analyzed to produce psychological insights. Furthermore, in one-on-one interviews, we use projective exercises and laddering approaches to identify the emotional benefits and values that drive consumer choice.

Unlocking the Keys to Consumer Behavior

Many market research techniques simply skim the surface of consumer attitudes and opinions, failing to explore the unspoken but very powerful psychoanalytic drivers of behavior. There is a hidden world of unconscious and unstated needs which can be a rich source of information for marketers, but is virtually impossible to access just by asking people why they do what they do.

Think about your own behavior:

Do you always say what you mean?

Do you always do what you say you will do?

Do you always know why you do the things you do?

Imagine if you knew the unconscious programs that are integral to your consumer's belief systems? By knowing these unconscious programs, you can communicate to your consumers in ways that are understood by their “hearts” instead of their “heads," giving you valuable tools to exert real influence over their behavior.

At Gray Insight, we can cost effectively incorporate long-established methods of psychoanalytic analysis into practically any project, whether qualitative or quantitative. These techniques can be as simple as asking consumers to write stories about a particular topic or to bring in pictures or objects as a homework assignment prior to focus groups or individual interviews. Gather enough of these and we can conduct a Force Field Analysis of the unconscious drivers that are influencing your consumers.

Previous projects have discovered:

What the Freemasons and a large successful bank have in common.

How shopping at a popular chain store is like diving for treasure.

Why dating is like entering a lottery.

What does this mean to you? It means that you can tap the hidden motivators of your consumers in a number of different ways. For instance, a full-blown Gray Insight Typology study will unlock the "code" that defines your brand or category and give you a model that you can use to direct all further marketing initiatives. Or, we can conduct a Discourse Analysis of focus groups conducted by your preferred moderator to uncover what lies beneath what they're saying.

For an initial, no-obligation research consultation or to book a Gray Insight Capabilities Webinar, please complete the following form: